


I'm trapped in this body and can't get out

by azurejay (andchimeras)



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Community: transbandom, F/M, Gen, Other, Therapy, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-28
Updated: 2008-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-08 08:09:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchimeras/pseuds/azurejay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where there's a woman trapped in Pete Wentz's life, and her name is Pete Wentz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm trapped in this body and can't get out

Ashlee comes in to the kitchen in the morning and Pete is sitting at the island with a plate of Bagel Bites, a cup of coffee, and a magazine. He's staring, quiet, at the open page, a Bagel Bite clamped in his teeth.

"Hey," Ashlee says, taking the Mueslix out of the cupboard. "What's up?"

He starts and the Bagel Bite falls out of his mouth on to the counter. "Uh," he says. "The _Out_ thing."

She grins as she pours her cereal. "It's so good," she says. "You did a great job, honey."

"Thanks," he says, absently. He chews some Bagel Bite, looking pensive.

"You didn't say anything awful about my dad she had to cut out, right?" she teases.

"No," he says. He doesn't laugh or say something new and awful about her dad. He props his chin on his hand and scrunches his mouth up, still staring at the article.

She sits at the island opposite him and eats her cereal. Halfway through the bowl, she puts down her spoon and says, "Seriously. What's wrong?"

He says, "What if I _am_ a lesbian?" and she doesn't get it. Not at first.

She rolls her eyes, because he's got to be joking. "I'm sorry I'm not as hot as some of the dykes in this town, okay."

"No," he says, "no, that's not what I mean, Ash--" He spreads his hand open on the page where he's all facepalmy and topless. His hand covers all of his body and his hand in the photograph covers his face except for his eyes. "What if this isn't my body?" he says.

Her face goes blank; her mouth is open a little bit. He gets like this, they both know it; he has these borderline psychotic episodes that last a day, a few hours, it's not--it's the meds, and it's his brain, and it's not--

"If this is Punk'd, I hate you," she says hoarsely. "I'm serious. I will divorce you _today_."

He blinks and shakes his head; his eyebrows draw together and he pushes the magazine away. "I'm not punking you," he says. "I hate my dick."

"Okay," she says. She stares at the picture, at the body she knows like the path she used to take to school every day. She bites her lip. "You should talk to Dave about this," she says.

"No shit," he says. He eats another Bagel Bite, irritatedly.

"Can I have one?" she asks, reaching out, her palm up. He gives her a Bagel Bite without a lot of tomato sauce. She doesn't like the sauce that much.

* * *

  


  
They don't talk about it again that morning. Pete gets his security guy to drive him to therapy in the afternoon, and he talks about it with Dave, just like Ashlee suggested.

"It's like--I've never felt comfortable in my body," he says, sitting in an overstuffed chair with his hands on the arms, still wearing his jacket.

Dave nods from across the coffee table. He's sitting on the couch. He always sits on the couch. Pete always finds this terribly amusing and never says anything about it. Dave gestures for Pete to keep talking.

"I'm like, like--I used to cut, okay, we've talked about that," Pete says. Dave nods again. "I don't like my body. I just. I never really had a picture of what it was supposed to look like instead, you know. And then, that reporter, Shana--it's not even the first time someone's called me a lesbian, it's just--I never really _read_ it before, you know. I never really--it didn't--it made sense." He finds himself twisting his hands together painfully in his lap, suddenly wide-eyed and not a little scared. "It made sense."

"Okay," Dave says. "I hear what you're saying."

Pete grimaces and shakes his head. "It's not like I ever--like, wore my mom's clothing or anything. Well. A few times. But I stopped when I was fucking seven. Everybody does that, right. It's just--I think. I think, this explains everything."

Dave cocks his head. "It might." He shrugs. "It might not."

"I really hate my dick," Pete says.

Dave smiles involuntarily, just a little bit; he doesn't show his teeth. "We're working on that, aren't we?"

"Yeah," Pete says.

Dave rubs his thumb over his mouth, erasing the smile. After a moment, he says, "I'm going to ask you to put this in a box for a while, okay. A box to think about, but not obsess over."

"A box?" Pete asks. "A fucking--put my gender in a fucking box. Put my life in a fucking box. This goddamn body in a goddamn box, right, yeah, just what we all fucking need. That's a perfect fucking solution." He puts his hand on his forehead and demands, "Are you insane?"

"You're a person," Dave says. Pete closes his eyes. Dave says again, "You're a person, Pete."

"I'm a person," Pete says, and he feels it, too, for the first time today.

"You're a human being," Dave says.

"I'm a human being," Pete says, and it's like his feet touch the ground--like he's just swung himself out of bed, out of a dream.

"You're a person who gets affected easily by things like this," Dave says. "You take ideas and run with them--it's a wonderful, creative quality, but it's also a tendency you need to be aware of."

"I know," Pete says. He knows, he knows; it's why he's fucking famous. He's well-fucking-aware of his fucking obsessive tendencies.

"So we're going to put this in a box for a while," Dave says.

"Yeah," Pete says. He looks away from Dave, away from the empy coffee table and his own white-knuckled hands. He looks at the window, the shade drawn over it; he puts it in a box, but he leaves the lid off.

* * *

  


  
The box scheme lasts for like a year. He lives in the box, carries the box, walks carefully to keep the box in his line of sight, to make sure it doesn't sneak up on him or make him do anything horrible and unexpected. It's just there, in his peripheral vision, in the way his shirts seem too baggy in the chest sometimes, or his hips too narrow. He starts thinking he's accidentally-deliberately buying his clothes too big; he starts thinking his subconscious is at work. His trainer says he's just lost five pounds he can't really spare--

> **Bigdoubt.com** welcomes **Pete Wentz** (AKA Mr. **Ashlee Simpson**-Wentz) to the emaciation stage of addiction (see: **Kate Moss**, **Mischa Barton**, **Keira Knightley**). Enjoy your stay! May it be a long one, as it means more stories for us, and less time in Bloated Cokewhore Land for you! Then again, we could probably get just as many stories out of a bloated cokewhore. Carry on your merry way, Pete! The snowy hills are calling!

He determinedly eats an entire pepperoni pizza. He decidedly does not post "i am i who am i" or "what if i _am_ a lesbian?" or "i'm only addicted to your addiction to me" or "conceal me what i am, and be my aid/for such disguise as haply shall become/the form of my intent" on the internet. He does not obsess. He doesn't even think about it; he doesn't have to, it's there anyway.

* * *

  


  
His sex life has always been composed more of getting people off than being gotten off, but it's obviously getting kind of ridiculous when Ashlee drags his head up and kisses herself off his mouth and says, "_Please_, okay, _fuck_ me, it's been a _month_, please--" and he does, keeping one hand between them, petting her and helping her stroke her clit when she gets there, basically pretending he's not fucking her; basically pretending he's wearing a strap-on that's getting him off too, and when he's done, he puts his face in her neck and holds her thighs up around his waist while she jerks herself off. He's listening intently to her panting and small noises and the sound of her hands at her cunt; listening and memorizing and feeling her orgasm move through her like a carousel and he shapes his mouth against her neck, against her throat, around her resonance.

* * *

  


  
It must be getting pretty ridiculous when he's buying shoes and keeps finding himself, his gaze, straying towards the women's section. His attention wanders from Stephen and Patrick arguing about matte versus patent and Joe's wedding's colour scheme across the store to wedge heels and red satin pumps and peekaboo toes and--he focuses on a pair of tall, black leather boots with a reasonable heel.

"These ones," Stephen announces, presenting Pete with a pair of matte black wingtips with oxblood accents. A few feet away, Patrick shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

"Okay," Pete says. "Charge it. Let's get the fuck out of here."

* * *

  


  
It's getting beyond ridiculous--it's getting _out of hand_ when he finds himself staring at his suit the morning of Joe's wedding. He's standing in his suite at the hotel, half-dressed in shirt and underwear and socks. The suit was made by the same designer and altered by the same tailor as the tux he wore for his own wedding. The cut is similar; the jacket doesn't have any tails. He touches the crimson tie hanging inside the shell of the suit's jacket, imagining for a second that it's his heart, hanging inside the shell of his designed and tailored and polished life.

He gets dressed mechanically, anchoring his motions to the sounds of Ashlee in the bathroom, showering and touching up her new dye job and--humming something to herself, probably painting her nails.

The shoes Stephen picked out pinch like a son of a bitch. Pete silently nudges open the bathroom door and watches Ashlee turn to look at her butt in the mirror, frowning a little, wearing a strapless bra and panties and stockings. She catches sight of Pete, who is also frowning a little. "What?" she asks, brushing her long, straight, black hair over her shoulder, smiling.

"Uh--nothing. I just--do you need anything?" he mumbles, mutters, asks as she pulls the bathroom door open and pushes him back from the doorway gently, both hands on his chest.

"Actually," she says, opening a dress box on the chaise in the corner. "Button me up?"

She lifts a dress the colour of a cedar flame from the box and steps into it. She holds the bodice over her chest and presents her back to Pete. Of course the dress closes with a million little buttons.

While he's fastening them, Pete memorizes the texture of the satin against his hands. He closes the dress around and over Ashlee's smooth, pale skin and envies it--the dress, and her skin. He looks at the scoop neckline cutting across her shoulderblades and envies her narrow shoulders, her sweet, gentle hips, the fall of hair she's holding out of the way, and it's not the familiar jealousy of a lover, of someone who wants to be that close. It's the envy of another, it's wanting to _have_, to _be_; it's getting completely out of hand. What kind of crazy asshole envies his own wife?

Button after button after tiny fucking button. They seem to be getting smaller, or his fingers are getting bigger, clumsier, _wrong_. His fingers trip and stutter over half a dozen of them before he mutters, "Fuck," and fumbles another one.

"What is it?" she asks.

"Nothing. Just--why a million little buttons?" he asks peevishly.

She turns in his hands and smiles, eyes wry, chin tilted, one hand still holding the dress over her chest. "I thought it would be funny to watch you try to undo them later, when you're sleep-deprived and tipsy," she says, and her smile turns into the devilish little smirk he loves.

"Oh," he says, and turns her back around and gets back to the buttons.

* * *

  


  
It takes six more months for the whole thing to move past ridiculous and into awful. He's posing for _Vanity Fair_ in skinny slacks and a buttondown and about four pounds of eyeliner and hair product and the photographer asks him to unbutton his shirt; he only feels the everyday hesitation before he shrugs and does it, his stomach curdling and his throat twisting in familiar knots.

Five minutes later, it's, "How about we lose the shirt, Pete," and that's it, he's had enough of this--the woman's eyes and the faces of her assistants around her and the magazine people and his people on opposite sides of the room, and the enormous shining eye of the camera, all watching and knowing he'll do it, why wouldn't he, they've all seen, they all know what he's got, what he is under the thin protection of this three hundred dollar shirt; they know who he is; they _think they know_.

He remembers with sickening sudden clarity that the skeezy photographer in the "Arms Race" video was supposed to be just a joke, just a fucking joke, just laughing at his own paranoid imaginings, but this. This is _just like that_. Only worse.

Even worse than it being true, than having everything just completely exposed to the world when he'd thought--it doesn't matter what he thought, he can't even remember what he thought, except that it was strange how seeing row after row of thumbnail images of his dick on Google felt like having his skin peeled from his flesh.

This, right now, in these clothes that aren't his and this body and these eyes: worse than having his dick littered across the internet and on a million hard drives like the laughable amateur porn it was. Because that was him, he did that, he felt those things and took those pictures, and what people were seeing was real and true, but this--today. The pictures the photographer wants to take, the pictures the magazine wants to print, the body these people want to sell: it is not real.

It's not him: the words bubble up from his stomach into his throat and he closes his eyes and there is the most familiar bile burn. It isn't his.

He barely manages to get the shirt off and out of the way before he pukes on the stark white floor panel, arms crossing and clenching protectively across his chest. The godawful ugly pants stay clean, thank fuck.

* * *

  


  
It stops being awful and starts being everything else when he gets home from the truncated shoot and confronts himself in the bathroom mirror with a close shave and his hair straightener and one of Ashlee's thin, yellow plastic headbands. He tucks the headband behind his ears and combs his hair out in front of it, giving himself the ghost of an asymmetrical hipster fringe. He takes out his contacts and puts on his glasses--not any of the giant stupid vintage ones--_his_ glasses, his I'm-at-home-with-my-wife-and-dogs glasses. Little black plastic ones, almost like something Patrick would wear. He puts them on and adjusts his hair again, and. There he is.

He smooths his hands over his smooth cheeks and bites his bottom lip and doesn't even think about getting out his make-up kit or stealing some of Ashlee's innocuous peach lipgloss. He presses his right wrist with its innocuous pink scars and concealing black ink to his suddenly warm forehead. He closes his eyes and when he opens them, he's dropped his hand and has no choice but to see himself again.

"There you are," he says to his reflection, like he's been waiting on a train platform for hours.

"There you are," the woman in the mirror mouths, voiceless, and they smile at each other in wonderment, in recognition, and they realize that Pete _has_ been waiting.

End.


End file.
